‘X-Men: Apocalypse’ Will End The ‘First Class’ Trilogy And Give Clarity To The Timeline Changes

In ‘X-Men: Days of Future Past,’ we were given hope that the ‘X-Men’ franchise wasn’t dead in the water. We also hoped that moving forward, we’d be given more fun stories once again. However, what the film actually did was radically change the timeline by introducing time travel and changing the events from the past, therefore changing the events in the future.

Simon Kinberg has weighed in a little about what is to come as well as what the last movie really meant. ‘Days of Future Past’ pretty much changed the events of most of the films. Because of this, the chronological order of the movies now stands as:

‘X-Men: First Class’

‘Days of Future Past dealing with the past’

‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’

‘X-Men’

‘X2’

‘X-Men: The Last Stand’

‘The Wolverine’

‘Days of Future Past dealing with the future’

This means that everything from ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’ and onward has potentially been altered. So what kind of changes can we expect? Well according to Kinberg:

“We changed the timeline for everything that came after ‘DOFP’ – so ‘X-Men 1’, 2 and 3, even ‘The Wolverine.’ So Jean [Grey] was not killed in ‘Last Stand’, nor was Scott, and a whole lot of other things rippled.”

Wait, ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine’ was retconned? What about Wolverine? As Kinberg explains, “We don’t see it because he doesn’t pop his claws at the end of the movie [but like with elements of the story] perhaps how he got his claws is different. But he lands ultimately in the same destination.”

I wonder if this means that we’ll be getting a continuation of the story with previous cast members and having the entire thing retconned or are they going to be rebooting the series with an entirely new cast and give us the main mutants as they are learning how to use their powers. Well, that gets answered too because if they include any of them for ‘Apocalypse,’ they “would have to recast them because ‘Apocalypse’ takes place a good 20 years before ‘X1’ which now insanely is 10-15 years ago. It would be very hard to do. Halle [Berry], Famke [Janssen] and James [Marsden] have done such a wonderful job bringing those characters to life and have been so identified with the parts.”

What seems to be going to happen with the upcoming movie is that ‘Apocalypse’ is going to end a trilogy started with ‘First Class’ hinting that, if they follow suit, we’ll be seeing tales of the mutants told in trilogies. This could in theory give us a focus on a different set of X-men for each outgoing:

“The thrust of ‘Apocalypse’ is really to complete the trilogy we began with ‘First Class’ – to complete the stories of young Raven, young Hank, younger Charles and Erik. And complete this trilogy of four people who began the films sort of disparate and in different worlds…[and who] we’ve followed through the span of decades. So that’ll be the thrust. There will be familiar characters and new characters that we haven’t seen…ever…but it’ll be the completion of what we began in ‘First Class’.”

I wonder where they will go next? Well, one potential idea would be to add mutants that weren’t included in ‘Days of Future Past’ that the filmmakers had wanted to highlight in the film. Cable was brought up but not too big of a deal as he’ll probably be in the ‘X-Force‘ movie but Psylocke was another potential name. As Kinberg hinted:

” [Psylocke} has a cool power. I know Bryan thinks she’s a neat character so there’s certainly a chance she’ll be in an ‘X-Men’ movie some day. Hopefully there’ll be a lot of ‘X-Men’ movies and there’s lot of mutants we’re yet to fully explore onscreen, even if they’ve had cameos before. Now we’re making more films there’s a chance to dig deeper.”

A lot of fun details here and you can watch the full interview below:

Are you looking forward to the changes to the X-Men cinematic universe? What story would you like to see them tackle in the future?

Stuart Conover

Stuart Conover is a father, husband, blogger, published author, geek, entrepreneur, editor of Horror Tree, horror fanatic, science fiction junkie, lives in a world of comics, and a casual gamer (all of this when his wife lets him of course.) He fell in love with science fiction and horror at the same time while watching the movie Alien at probably far too young of an age while still being extremely impressionable and has been happily obsessed with both since! Around the same time, he had also developed an unhealthy addiction to comic books that continues to this day!Want to talk about anything geeky? Reach out on Twitter - @StuartConover